What Would You Have Done?... Newt Gingrich On Conservative's Response To Nelson Mandela's Passing

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny


Newt Gingrich, while not my favorite Republican does a great job of honoring a great man and transformational leader, Nelson Mandela. His question to conservatives, "What would you have done?" is one that I, and probably thousands, it not millions of other thinking people would like you to answer.

You know who you are. Be honest with yourselves, answer the question truthfully. If you cannot see the rightness and wisdom in the words of a former conservative Republican leader of the House of Representatives then you have, IMNHO, lost the right to call yourselves Patriots.

GINGRICH PRODUCTIONS - Yesterday I issued a heartfelt and personal statement about the passing of President Nelson Mandela. I said that his family and his country would be in my prayers and Callista’s prayers.

I was surprised by the hostility and vehemence of some of the people who reacted to me saying a kind word about a unique historic figure.

So let me say to those conservatives who don’t want to honor Nelson Mandela, what would you have done?

Mandela was faced with a vicious apartheid regime that eliminated all rights for blacks and gave them no hope for the future. This was a regime which used secret police, prisons and military force to crush all efforts at seeking freedom by blacks.

What would you have done faced with that crushing government?

What would you do here in America if you had that kind of oppression?

Some of the people who are most opposed to oppression from Washington attack Mandela when he was opposed to oppression in his own country.

After years of preaching non-violence, using the political system, making his case as a defendant in court, Mandela resorted to violence against a government that was ruthless and violent in its suppression of free speech.

As Americans we celebrate the farmers at Lexington and Concord who used force to oppose British tyranny. We praise George Washington for spending eight years in the field fighting the British Army’s dictatorial assault on our freedom.

Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote and the Continental Congress adopted that “all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Doesn’t this apply to Nelson Mandela and his people?

Some conservatives say, ah, but he was a communist.

Actually Mandela was raised in a Methodist school, was a devout Christian, turned to communism in desperation only after South Africa was taken over by an extraordinarily racist government determined to eliminate all rights for blacks.

I would ask of his critics: where were some of these conservatives as allies against tyranny? Where were the masses of conservatives opposing Apartheid? In a desperate struggle against an overpowering government, you accept the allies you have just as Washington was grateful for a French monarchy helping him defeat the British.

Finally, if you had been imprisoned for 27 years, 18 of them in a cell eight foot by seven foot, how do you think you would have emerged? Would you have been angry? Would you have been bitter?

Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison as an astonishingly wise, patient, and compassionate person.

He called for reconciliation among the races. He invited his prison guard to sit in the front row at his inauguration as President. In effect he said to the entire country, “If I can forgive the man who imprisoned me, surely you can forgive your neighbors.”

Far from behaving like a communist, President Mandela reassured businesses that they could invest in South Africa and grow in South Africa. He had learned that jobs come from job creators.

I was very privileged to be able to meet with President Mandela and present the Congressional Medal of Freedom. As much as any person in our lifetime he had earned our respect and our recognition.

Before you criticize him, ask yourself, what would you have done in his circumstances?

Here is my statement from yesterday on President Nelson Mandela:
President Nelson Mandela was one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime.

He emerged from 27 long years in prison with a wisdom, a compassion, and a commitment to help other people that was astonishing. His life was a triumph of the human spirit.

When he visited the Congress I was deeply impressed with the charisma and the calmness with which he could dominate a room. It was as if the rest of us grew smaller and he grew stronger and more dominant the longer the meeting continued.

His thoughtful disciplined but friendly and warm personality made him a leader who could define the right policies and the right behaviors.

Nelson Mandela was truly the father of an integrated, democratic South Africa.

He will be an inspiration for generations to come and an historic leader worth studying for as long as people want to learn about greatness in serving others.

Callista and I extend our condolences and our prayers to the Mandela family and to the people of South Africa.



Via: Memeorandum

Comments

  1. Churchill and FDR made a pact with Stalin to beat back Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. Newt's right. You do what ya' gotta do.

    ReplyDelete
  2. When Newt's right, you couldn't ask for a better advocate.

    JMJ

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  3. Gingrich is really bad at the boilerplate partisan crap. Really bad. But sometimes he surprises. Like this, and other times. He has it in him, in other words. He should show more of it, like he has here.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't really buy the "surprise" thing, though. I mean, where's he been?

    JMJ

    ReplyDelete
  5. Churchill and FDR made a pact with Stalin ...

    A sad and true fact of irony in history. WWII began within weeks of Soviet Stalinism and Hitlerian Fascism signing a pact of non-aggression (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) and Germany invaded Poland from the west. Within a few more weeks Poland was invaded from the east by the Soviet Union. Before the month of September 1939 was out Poland had been invaded on two fronts and the country carved up. Because England had signed an agreement with Poland that she would side with Poland in cases such as invasion by foreign forces Britain involved itself in the war.

    Germany became the enemy of the moment again. Stalin became an "ally of freedom"??? Hindsight should be 20/20. Can we agree that the big winner of WWII, the country that gained the most just happened to be the Soviet Union and Stalin. The debatable point would be: Was this by accident or design? Personally I lean toward "by design" as we can observe the world and its precarious position today.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So, then, the US wasn't the "big winner?" Seems to me we made the most money out of the deal. Russia lost 20,000,000 people. Hard to call that a "win."

      JMJ

      Delete
    2. I've forgotten, how many did Stalin himself have purged from existence (Russian citizens) by his leftist communist government?

      Delete
    3. Good point, RN. During that period, more Soviet citizens were killed by domestic socialism than by the German socialist invaders. The Russian people didn't "win", but Hitler had nothing to do with that. They had been losing since Lenin reversed progress and undid the advances of the Russian Revolution when he overthrew democracy.

      Delete
    4. IMO, the economic system of a country is far different than totalitarianism. Stalin hated socialists, Hitler hated communists: but those they killed were neither; Stalin the Kulaks
      Ukrainians and military; Hitler, the Jews, Union leaders, Socialists and the infirm. They
      were equally inhuman and detestable and we will never know the millions of innocents caught in the hellfire. Remember, Rome wiped Carthage from the map...long before the
      concept of Nazi or Communist. It is about power and too much of it.

      Delete
  6. Jersey certain big American companies (General Electric, General Motors, Ford, Standard Oil and ITT) to name a few made plenty of money by supplying materiel to both sides in the war. The Soviets got Eastern Europe handed over to them against the will of many of the individual citizens involved, since they had expected that an allied victory might have implied some sort of freedom and not becoming enslaved anew to the victorious tyrant in that war. I don't believe that Stalin would have factored in deaths of 20,000,000 slaves to the system a steep cost for the gains he won from the West.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This post Waylon is about the idiocy of some (perhaps many) conservatives that refuse to acknowledge Nelson Mandela as the transformational leader he was. Newt Gingrich, an accepted conservative spokesperson called the idiot wing of conservatives on their idiocy.

      So dude, please stick to the post subject or just go away quietly. OKAY?

      Delete

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